Menu

The Haskell Craze

Haskell is a functional language that has been in development since the late 1980’s, but despite all its amazing features it is currently #48 on TIOBE’s Programming Index . Arguably Ruby-on-rails brought Ruby to the masses and Google’s use of Python did the same for Python. It seems that it is not simply language features that lead to a language’s popularity, but a combination of good language design and a practical platform for evangelism.

More generally, functional programming doesn’t have the following that OOP enjoys. It is the old story, object-oriented programming provides a mechanism to model real-world objects and can perhaps lead to writing code that reflects the way we think of problems. Functional programming styles perhaps do not fit as nicely into our ‘physical’ view of the world. I would argue that the more popular functional languages; JavaScript, Lisp, F# and Scala, have developed to bridge the impedance mismatch, providing convenient OO-like interfaces in places (in fact, I would go as far as saying that Scala is actually functional Java). But not Haskell. Haskell is a pure functional language. So, I am always on the lookout for professional systems that are using Haskell, and recently came across the following article: stop-wasting-billions-of-dollars-using-the-wrong-software-languages. And hence, the reason for this post – to spread the good word about Haskell 🙂